Prosensa Announces Progress on Exon Skipping Compounds

Posted on October 23, 2012 by

Prosensa Announces Progress on Exon Skipping Compounds for the Treatment of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy – £10m in milestone payments received from GlaxoSmithKline

Leiden, the Netherlands, October 23, 2012 – Prosensa, the Dutch biopharmaceutical company focusing on RNA-modulating therapeutics for rare diseases with high unmet need, has selected clinical candidates for two more compounds for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and has been granted orphan drug designation for two additional DMD compounds in its pipeline.

Prosensa identified suitable oligonucleotide candidates for PRO052 and PRO055, designed for the skipping of exons 52 and 55 of the dystrophin gene. PRO052 and PRO055 are currently in pre-clinical development and will be moved to clinical trials as soon as possible.

College Hill Life Sciences – Anastasios Koutsos / Henry Stanley

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What is Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy?

The words “incurable” and “untreatable” have been closely associated with Duchenne. It is an X-chromosome disease that afflicts boys, and it will never be eliminated through genetic screening because the dystrophin gene is the largest gene in body – times ten – and thus much more prone to have flaws that are not inherited. The trajectory of this disorder is insidious. Duchenne boys typically are not diagnosed until they are four years old or older. They tend to get better in the so-called “honeymoon” stage, which usually lasts until the early teenage years. But their muscles are deteriorating and cannot regenerate. Dystrophin is part of the chemical glue that holds muscle cell walls together, and those walls eventually collapse and are filled with collagen that causes fibrosis. First the legs give out, slowly, then, the arms and upper body. The disease moves from skeletal muscle to smooth muscle tissue. Lungs and hearts deteriorate. Corticosteroid treatment forestalls the muscle deterioration, but steroids have terrible side effects such as making bones brittle. Unlike many single-gene-defect disorders that only strike at certain ethnicities or demographics, Duchenne is a disease that does not discriminate – it is the world’s leading lethal inherited disease, afflicting one in 3,500 boys. The incidence rate among all races is identical. As the world becomes more conscious of issues of racial disparity, it is clear that standards of care are resulting in disparate quality of life and certainly life expectancy among sufferers of different races. You get the picture. Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is excruciating, ruthless, sadistic, and painful. More than anything, it is cruel. The FED’s mission is to identify, leverage, and bring to market treatments that will benefit ALL sufferers of this disease.